Grimm Recap: Made in Organ and The MILF Huntress

Beast of the Week:Geiers, goblins with vulture-like features who swoop down from trees and rip out their prey's organs, then sell them on the black market so other creatures can get boners. Seriously.

Source Material: “Hansel and Gretel,” hinted at not just by the epigraph but with that trademarked Grimm subtlety of naming two guest characters “Hansen and Gracie.”

The Procedural: The pale, bloated body of a street kid named Steven is found on a riverbank, missing several pints of blood and with two puncture wounds in his neck. Oh, and he's also got a pocket full of pukka shells (isn't the name of a Spin Doctors album?). Hank and Nick take a walk down to Portland's pukka shell district, which is apparently Ankeny Square. There, they find two of the more well-scrubbed street kids you'll ever see (that'd be Hansen and Gracie) selling necklaces, who inform the detectives that Steven had recently been offered a job by someone driving a white van. Didn't your parents tell you never to trust anyone in a white van? Oh, wait, these kids don't have parents. Sorry.

Hank and Nick then check out a free clinic that's all the rage with homeless teens, where they meet sexy Dr. Levine (Valerie Cruz, whose credits include playing sexy Latina doctors on basically every network police procedural you can name), but they're quickly called away to the scene of a car accident. A van has overturned, splattering iced human organs all over the street. “This town is just getting weirder,” says Hank. Yeah, I mean, have you seen how many people own unicycles around here? It's weird, man!

To the Magic Winnebago! Nick reads up on geiers, then visits Eddie Monroe. Monroe informs Nick about the organ-harvesting underworld, and tells him that in the creature world, human testicles are the equivalent of Chinese three-penis wine. Cut to a mortar and pestle grinding a pair of almonds (well played, Grimm). At Nick's behest, Eddie visits a holistic medicine shop and picks up some gollumblaze (I think that's what he said). After tests reveal the powder is made up of “pure human gall bladder,” Nick accosts the shop owner, who reveals the car crash victim transporting all those body parts is the store's delivery driver.

Back at the station, the cops manage to “triangulate” the number (there's only one number, apparently) on the driver's cell phone, leading them to a trailer out in the woods. Following a shootout, the cops enter to find a veritable organ farm set up in the back. They also find a cell phone containing the number of the free clinic. The detectives go back to the clinic, where no one will talk...until Nick goes all Grimm again, threatening an employee. Turns out, the clinic is a front for a geier organ harvesting operation preying on street kids. The worker gives up the location of the main harvesting site, and the cops descend, leading to another shootout. Nick runs off into the woods and brawls with Dr. Levine (now considerably less sexy, looking like a vulture goblin), who puts up a good fight until accidentally falling backward into a fire pit and incinerating herself.

Other Developments: In the cold open, Nick talks to Monroe about revealing his Grimmliness to Juliette. He asks Monroe is blutbad-out for her, to prove fairy tale creatures exist among humans, but Monroe argues that the human mind cannot comprehend coming face-to-face with “the boiling core of the raw universe.” And in the final scene, Captain Renard receives a package from the Reapers: a box containing the ear Renard sliced off with a scythe a few episodes back, accompanied by a threatening phone call. The plot, as they say, thickens.

Grade: A-. A truly solid episode, hitting a nearly perfect pitch of supernatural horror and cop show drama and bookending with two important developments pertaining the overarching storyline. It's also nice to see Nick embracing his Grimmosity a bit more—unfortunately, David Giuntoli still has the charisma of a carpet sample.

Grimm, Season 1, Episode 11: “Tarantella”

Beast of the Week:Spinnetod, spider creatures who kill their victims by puking a corrosive liquid down their throats, creating an insta-mummy.

The Procedural: In an upscale bachelor pad presumably in the Pearl, a corpse is found desiccated, its guts apparently sucked out its stomach (what's with the disembowelment theme these last two episodes?). Nick also finds a woman's severed finger, which wiggles as he picks it up. The prints on the finger are traced back to several other unsolved deaths across the country. Taking a cue from Dexter's Trinity Killer, the deaths-via-dry rot appear to happen in threes. And, wouldn't you know it, a few days after the first body is found, a second one turns up in a hotel room.

As usual, Nick consults the Magic Winnebago and reads about spinnetods. He goes to Monroe for more information, and Monroe takes him to an old folks home for Wesen—oh, by the way, that's the umbrella term for the inhabitants of the creature world; I don't know if that's the first time that term has been used or if I just haven't been paying attention—where he's introduced to an elderly spinnetod. Turns out, the woman is actually 26 years old. According to her, spinnetods suffer from rapid aging, and depend on the blood of young men to stay youthful.

Meanwhile, the police are alerted to a stolen watch being traded among students at a local middle school. The watch is traced back to the second mummification victim. Questioning the girl who sold the watch to another student, Hank and Nick discover she took it from her parents. The dad gets hauled back to the station, while the detectives ask the mother about the bandage on her finger. She removes the bandage to reveal she does, in fact, have all ten fingers, seemingly disqualifying her from suspicion.

However, prints taken from the house reveal a match with the finger found at the original crime scene. Hank can't fathom how that's possible, but still, it's enough to send the cops bursting into her house with an arrest warrant. She's already gone to commit her third murder, though. They track her to a marina on the Willamette, where she's on a boat attempting to seduce a douchebag in a turtleneck sweater. She takes off and Nick gives chase, nearly falling victim to her Vomit of Doom. Eventually, Nick manages to knock her into a net, trapping her in a tangled web—literally. The cruel hand of irony strikes again!

Other Developments: After a bunch of Wesen kids egg his house, Nick tracks them down and discovers they're related to the timid plumber who first recognized Nick as a Grimm a couple weeks back. Nick goes rogue, threatening the creatures and telling them to stay away from his family. Also worth noting: the plumber and his buddies are some sort of beaver-like rodent, and there's all kinds of Oregon State paraphernalia in his home. Oh, and there's a scene where Monroe uses Aardvark Sauce. Nice local shoutout.

Grade: B. A fairly middling episode after last week's peak. Again, the continuing development of Nick's character, who seems to be actively embracing his status as a supernatural crime-fighter, is a good thing. If only there were a better actor portraying him, I'd actually be mildly excited about Grimm's future. Can they swap him out next season? Or would that be too much of a “two Darrins” scenario?